[Wikipedia-l] since we are on legal matters ...

Wed Nov 26 18:19:40 UTC 2003

Since we are on legal matters, I would like that
enlightement is brought to me on a GFDL license point
: the one that is about authorship :-)

Mav claims I am illegally removing the credit for text
I did not write myself.

I answered that I mentionned in the comment box that I
was not the original author, hence not doing anything
illegal and definitly not stealing anyone else job.

Mav answers : Wrong. Read the author credit areas of
the GNU Free Documentation License.

So my question is : if none of us has the right to
attribute to himself the credit of something written
by someone else, what happen to all the major amount
of text that is regularly clipped from one article,
and moved to another page by someone who is not the
original author of the text ? How does the licence
handle that ? If the moved text contains legal issues,
who is said liable, the lost original author, or the
one who took the responsability of the move and who is
consequently the owner of the edit?

And is commenting in the comment box that we are not
the original author of the edit not enough to insure
legal rights of authorship are respected ? What are we
supposed to do when moving someone else work ? Is
commenting enough ? Or not ? Should we leave a message
in the talk page ?

Depending on the answers provided (I really understand
little of the gfdl matters :-))

I would like also to have an old edit of mine restored
as *mine*, as I was the main author of it.

It is there
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Agricultural_science&action=history

The edits credited to Maveric and Robert Merkel are
mine entirely. It was my fifth edit as Anthere. And my
additions still constitute very much the core of the
current article. It was a welcome present to the
newbie Anthere that it was credited to someone else.

Not to be a pain either, but I would like as well,
that the creation of the article "Trade war over
genetically modified food" credited to Graft, be
credited to me, as the content was my work (Graft just
excised it from "genetically modified food" that I had
made a few days before) and as most of the article is
still essentially my work.

It is here
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Trade_war_over_genetically_modified_food&limit=50&offset=50&action=history

Now,

* either legal issues are used to attack other
wikipedians in dishonest ways, and if my work being
credited to other people is making these edits
illegal, then I really would like that these credits
taken by other people be given back to me, to respect
the license. I would not like that the license is not
respected :-) In this case, any major move from one
article to another should also mention clearly all the
main authors of the piece moved.

* or we admit that we are together building an
encyclopedia, that ownership is secondary in our
building process, and that what is important is the
content, not the author. I would very much prefer that
option :-)

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